Comedy in Crayton
Robert Francis Dorey

Like Two Horny, Filthy Teenagers
Chapter One

	It was the eighteenth of July and Hillary had already forgotten about her run in with the fat weirdo named Jim.  It didn’t seem right that Jim was blackmailing her right now, as she had many other things on her mind, least of which who she was going to snog next.  It’s just that ever since she had first snogged Jack at the end of the fiscal year she had developed an insatiable desire for it.  All day long, it was, “I could snog him,” at the sight of particularly handsome engineer; or, “He’d snog real nice,” at the sight of a movie star she couldn’t remember the name of; and also, “Why didn’t he snog me at the last dance?” at the sight of a fellow employee whom she had assaulted at the last co-worker dance of the year.  It seemed that her entire day was taken up by snogging, or thinking about snogging.  It so happened that that day she came across a guy who was quite as enveloped with snogging as she was.
	Bill was a tall and fairly handsome man whom Hillary had met only a few days previous in a Chapters bookshop where she had come to pick up the latest novel devoted to the topic of snogging, which of course is the new Adulpus Maytyr book, “Sherry Lodder and her Wealthy Fellows.”  He had been there with the same purpose in mind but when they had first caught sight of each other, neither made a move.  Both of them had had the same trouble when it came to snogging people, they were too forward about it and scared others off.  Therefore, both snoggers remained standing in silence, casting the occasional glance at each other, and both thinking the same thing, “That’d be a great snog, that would.”  And so their short time together in the pre-order pickup line at Chapters passed in the utmost lip-aching silence ever.
	Now, a few days later, Bill and Hillary found themselves face to face once again.  However, this time they were in the Go-Go Club, a strip joint renowned for its, well, what strip joints are renowned for.  It was, of course, but for the most ridiculous sets of coincidences that either of them stood there in the darkness, frequently illuminated by the pale pink and dark blue flashing light reflecting off of the sweaty midriffs of the dancers before them.
	Hillary had been on her way to the No Frills uptown when she came across a stranded friend on the main street.  Her friend, Magpie (no relation whatsoever to the bird), had been out collecting pop cans people had hurled from passing cars and was putting them in the trunk of her car when she realised that she had left the car in the middle of the motorway and it had been run into several times.  The result being that her car resembled an artistic designer’s idea of an Olympic torch more than anything else.  Hillary asked Magpie if she would like a ride home, and she replied with an enthusiastic, “Yes!”
	Magpie, however, lived on the opposite side of town from the No Frills and by the time they had reached her house, No Frills would surely have closed.  Magpie suggested that she visit a local convenience store, the Stop ‘N’ Go, that she naturally referred to as the Go-Go Club, because of its very cheap price on bananas, which she believed to be the best fruit to get you going in the morning.
	Hillary set off in search of what she thought was called the Go-Go Club, but whose name is actually the Stop ‘N’ Go while Magpie raged on endlessly about the degradation of the country’s highways.  Having only travelled a few minutes she came across the friendly neighbourhood strip joint and skipped on inside, believing the poorly strung Christmas lights were there because of the usual rush stores put on the holiday season, and the bars across the windows being there for security.
	Bill, whose story was remarkably similar to Hillary’s with the exception that it included three jovial panda bears and a bag of no name cat chow, stood aghast when he found himself standing witness to this mesmerizing display of sex - the good kind of sex, not the mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a machine instruction found in PDP-11 computer architecture.
	As one of the dancers gave a particularly provocative oscillation that shook Bill back into consciousness, Hillary took notice of him.  Here was the same man she had previously found so appetizing, now ogling a bunch of showgirls like a goat stares at a newfound empty can of beans.  Her desire to snog him suddenly fled from her like an unwanted bit of partially digested food, exactly like that actually, as she threw up all over him.  Bill was disgusted, and disgusting.  He was covered chest to toe with the slimy, green, foul smelling contents of Hillary’s stomach.
As Hillary rose back up to her full stature, now slightly paler, Bill recognised her as the woman he had so desired to snog in the Chapters store some days previous.  The sight of her and the sight of what she had done to him made his desire to snog her suddenly flee from him like an unwanted bit of partially digested food, exactly like that actually, as he threw up all over her.  Now Hillary was disgusting, and Bill was disgusting, but neither was disgusted.  They both looked into each other’s eyes and saw themselves reflected on each other’s pupils.  They both cracked a weak smile, which grew into a larger smile, which quickly vanished as both of them opened their mouths and flung themselves at each other and began snogging.
The two bodies, slimy, reeking, and disgusting beyond belief clung to each other so tightly that it was indiscernible whose leg was whose, and whose hand was whose, except perhaps by paying close attention to their destinations.  They snogged their way out of the strip joint, moving jaggedly towards the door, and were followed by cat calls from distant onlookers and cries of horror from those nearby.
They went through the door and out onto the sidewalk, interrupting several smokers who were taking long, shaky drags from their cigarettes.  The smokers stared in awe, smoke slowly curling out of the orifices in their heads, as Hillary and Bill cut through them and into the parking lot.
Bill directed himself and Hillary with great difficulty and frequent missteps to his car.  There, Hillary threw him onto the hood with such force that a small indentation remained where his back had been, unnoticed.  They snogged for what seemed like only a few minutes to them, but which was in actuality over an hour in the real world.  They had rolled slowly from the headlights to the driver’s side door, which Bill opened with his reluctantly drawn hand.
They both clamoured into the driver’s seat, Hillary on top of Bill, who was fumbling with his keys.  Starting the engine and putting the car into gear with his one free hand, he remained locked to Hillary’s lips as he began to very slowly pull out of the strip joint driveway.  There respective positions and activities, as one might presume, made driving a vehicle extremely difficult and immorally dangerous.  To complicate matters, Hillary had started to stroke Bill in a rather seedy area of his body, distracting him even further.
The climax of their situation (and no, it doesn’t mean what some might think it means) came when Bill, driving in quite a straight line and at a respectable speed, however on the wrong side of the road, forced a van full of cargo pants off the road and into the flag pole of the local post office.  The van burst into flames and its precious cargo, that is to say, the cargo pants were ruined.  This would seem not much of a travesty if it weren’t for Bill’s devotion to wearing cargo pants.  After seeing what he had done out of the corner of his one remaining open eye (the other having been sealed shut by Hillary’s extremely sticky lip gloss) Bill slammed on the car’s breaks and flung open the door with his foot.  He jumped out of the car as best he could with Hillary still clinging to him and made his way towards the wreckage of the van.
Unlocking their lips for the first time since their dramatic fusion, Hillary asked what Bill was doing.  He wailed with great anguish over the loss of the cargo pants and how he knew they would have found a great home with him.
“They would have looked beautiful hanging in my closet, and even more so hanging on me,” Bill lamented.
“Oh, I disagree,” replied Hillary, smirking.
“What?!” Bill turned to face her once more, his expression that of great rage.
“What I mean is,” Hillary soothed, running her finger along his chest, “is that I don’t really think you look good in those pants.”
“Outrageous slander!” Bill moved to shake her from his form.
“You’d look much better without pants at all.”
Bill stood motionless, his mouth hanging open while Hillary simply smiled at him, “D- d- d’ya mean…?”
“Oh yes, I do.”
Bill threw Hillary into his car, squealed its tires against the pavement, and threw a wad of twenty-dollar bills that would more than sufficiently pay for damages to the flagpole out the window.
This time with Hillary leaning over Bill from the passenger’s seat, Bill steered his car in the direction of his apartment complex by the lakeshore.  Slowly Hillary undid the zipper on Bill’s cargo pants, and unbuckled their belt.  She then crept up to his chest once again and began to kiss him, all the while pulling his pants down centimetre by centimetre.
Bill directed his growing excitement into the amount of pressure he was applying to the gas pedal.  Flying through the downtown, Bill released his foot from the gas pedal only for a second as Hillary tore off his cargo pants.  With renewed force on the gas pedal, the car whipped past the Stop ‘N’ Go convenience store, which had apparently been quite a long way from Magpie’s house and thus would have been a great inconvenience to Hillary if she had ever managed to find it.
Hillary moved to hover over Bill’s now swelling boxers and started to reach for their buttoned fly.  Bill’s thigh’s twitched, his whole body quaked as with a fierce hunger, his foot involuntarily pressed as far down on the gas pedal as it would go.  His whole mind focused only on one thing, sweat began to accumulate, then condense, and finally roll of his temple.  Every muscle ached, a thousand thoughts crossed his mind, but still focussing only on one, singular impulse.  He saw her pulling open the fly, reaching – for the door handle?  Asking him to stop?
“This’ll do here, it will,” she pointed out the window, which was nonsense since they had to be going two hundred past an old rail yard.  None the less, he slowed the car, stopped it, and Hillary got out.
“Um…” he gaped wordlessly at her, “Why?”
“Oh I just don’t think things should move that fast, is all,” to her it seemed so plain.
“But, but, you said I didn’t need cargo pants… and, and, and… you took mine off… you, you undid the fly of my boxers.”  He stared quizzically at her, still shocked at the night’s sudden turn in fortune.
“Oh well, we were just having a bit of fun, weren’t we?  I never intended it to go very far.  At least… not tonight.”  She smiled suggestively, tilting her head to one side.  She was clearly a very focused woman, but not at all good at expressing her plans to others, Bill thought.
“Why not tonight?” Bill asked incredulously.
“Oh well, I never shag the same day I first snog a guy, do I?  There, there,” she reached into the car and patted him on his bear knee.  “Well, here’s my number,” she scrawled out some digits on a notepad Bill kept on his dash and handed it to him, “Sleep well, then!”  And then she just turned and walked.
“Blimey,” Bill muttered unnecessarily, “I don’t know how much sleeping I’ll be able to get done.”  And with that, he signalled back onto the motorway and drove off in the direction of Paris, which was by pure coincidence the same direction that his home now lay in.

Assistants Make an Ass of You and Me   
Chapter Two

Occasionally this writer will get carried away and he apologizes for it.  There is always a reason, though, perhaps not the best reason or even a good one.  In fact, many of his reasons are so terrible that they don’t merit a mention in writing, nor may they be permitted to be spoken aloud.  However, his reasons are almost always emotional and his writing always a direct result of what he is feeling inside.  Much like our good hero, Bill.
For some very obvious reasons, Bill found it most difficult to forget that agonizingly passionate night some two weeks previous.  However, for less plain reasons, Bill had not yet given his would-be lover a call back yet.  He himself was unsure why he had not called her back.  She had made it very plain that she wanted to go all the way with him and seemingly, very soon.  However, it may have been that Bill was concerned that they would only get even closer to doing it the next time and she’d call it off again.  In the aftermath of her departure by the rail yard downtown, Bill had had to call into his work the next day and tell them he was sick, which was only partially true.  He didn’t have any malady, or at least nothing anyone would call a malady, he simply hadn’t gotten over his arousal from the previous night.  O, how he had tried.  All through the wee hours of the morning he tried to shake it off without any success.  He hadn’t done so much shaking since he had first learned shaking to be such a good thing.
Deep down inside, however, he knew that this wasn’t the right explanation at all.  What he feared most was that everything he had experienced that night might turn out to have been a dream.  He wasn’t a self-confident person at all and when honest with himself, he couldn’t understand why the woman had been so physically attracted to him.
As these thoughts flittered through Bill’s mind, he sat behind his desk in his office on the third story of the Descholtz Manufacturing Inc. building.  Descholtz Manufacturing was a company that currently specialized in the making of office desks.  The ironic part of the whole situation was that Bill’s desk had been purchased from a manufacturer in Thailand in order to save on shipping costs for Bill’s company.
It isn’t really quite proper to refer to it as “Bill’s company”, one should add, as he was merely an assistant to an assistant of a marketing assistant.  The big wigs in the company held offices at the top of the building that, at five stories, towered over the small city of Crayton.  Their desks were actually made by Descholtz Manufacturing and they also didn’t come apart when you opened one of the drawers.  This was a problem Bill had encountered with his desk on his first day as an assistant to an assistant of a marketing assistant when he went to put his pens and pencils in the top drawer.  The whole desk, computer, and piles of books stacked on its top came crashing down on his legs, breaking one and fracturing the other.  Bill had needed extensive reconstructive surgery, casts on both legs, and used a wheelchair for five months.  Unfortunately, the office’s elevators only stopped on the first, second, and fifth floors, so Bill was degraded to working in the basement.  And by the basement, I mean the parking garage.  And when I say parking garage, I mean he used his wheelchair-accessible van as an office.
When Bill finally returned to the third floor some eight months later (though free from a wheelchair after five months, he had been unable to climb stairs for three more) he found his desk just as he had left it, in a pile next to a now dried up puddle of blood.  For the three days it took maintenance to take the desk away and for the two it took the Thai company workers to bring his new desk in, Bill had shared a desk with the assistant to the marketing assistant.  During those first three days they had quickly bonded and became like brothers to each other.  They took all of their breaks together and immensely enjoyed each other’s witty tales about their licentious antics with women.  During the next two days, however, they came to hate each other with such passion that the assistant to the marketing assistant promised Bill he would make sure he went nowhere in the company, and Bill promised that he would misalign all of the documents he stapled for the assistant to the marketing assistant.
However, that was long in the past.  Bill’s future in Descholtz Manufacturing had looked brighter than ever after the assistant to the marketing assistant was fired because one of his irregularly aligned documents had made it all of the way to the president of the company.  The president informed the assistant to the marketing assistant that Descholtz Manufacturing had no place for miscreants of his kind and fired him… via a post-it note on the one remaining wall of the man’s cubicle when he arrived for work the next morning.
So, Bill’s future was unbelievably bright.  That is, up until his run-in with Ms. Amorous.  Since that near-passionate eve Bill’s superiors often caught him staring into space, or drooling on a pile of documents on his desk, or simply jacking off in the executive washroom.
“What the hell are you doing in here, Bill?!” the marketing chief asked him on one such occurrence, where the chief had stumbled across Bill in an unlocked stall.
“I, I, uh, um, I was, er…” Bill struggled as he pulled up his pants and did up his zipper.
“I know what the bloody hell you were doing in here, you don’t need to tell me!”
“But, sir, you asked, I was just-
“I don’t need you to paint me a picture, Bill, we all do it, but man, why in here, with the door ajar?  What could possibly have been going through you’re mind?!”  The chief hollered.
“Well, it was this woman, sir, that I almost- er, well, we almost, sir, I mean, that is to say that I was sure we were going to, but –”
“I’m certain that’s quite enough.  I don’t want to hear it!” and he turned and walked towards the door.  Stopping and turning his head, the chief said, “Bill, I won’t pussy-foot around this.  You’re a prime candidate for the assistant to the marketing assistant job and if I catch you slacking off again you’ll lose my vote.”
“Well, sir, it’s not like that title requires too much-
“I don’t care how much pot the last guy smoked while on the job, I want someone responsible for the position now, and I thought that was you.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
“You had better,” and with that the chief turned and left the washroom.
Bill took the chief’s comments with some consideration, but finished what he had started in the washroom anyway, and then left, with quite a few stares coming from the offices nearby.
That incident had only been two days ago, but Bill had completely forgotten it.  His mind was so totally enveloped with his romantic dilemmas that he didn’t hear the knocking on his office door.  And by office door I mean nameplate pinned to the short wall of his cubicle.
“Hey, Bill,” the knocker whispered.  “Not fooling around with yourself again, are you?”
There was no response.
“Bill!” the man shouted.
“What?!” Bill jumped from his chair with a start.  “Oh, it’s only you Jack.”
Jack was another assistant to an assistant about on par with Bill as far as seniority went, but he was perhaps twenty points lower on the IQ scale.  They were fairly good friends in the work place relationship scale, but it was mainly a one-way friendship.  Jack simply adored Bill: he envied his intelligence, his wit, and his character.  To Jack, Bill was perfect in every way except how he handled the ladies.  When it came to women, Jack had Bill far beat.
“I heard they’re announcing who’s getting the marketing assistant assistant job this afternoon.  Isn’t it exciting?!”  With a broad, wistful smile Jack looked over Bill’s cubicle wall to the tiny office window some distance away.
Jack turned his gaze back on Bill; Jack’s grin becoming only broader.  Bill met his gaze.  For nearly a minute the two stared at each other.
“Jack.”
Jack lifted from his trance.  “You’re a total shoe-in, man: everyone knows you’ve got what it takes,” Jack leaned on Bill’s desk, “Careful, one of your drawers is slightly ajar.”
“Oh thanks,” Bill pushed the drawer in the quarter of a centimetre it had come out.  “What it takes, eh?” Bill leaned back in his chair.  He sometimes found Jack annoying, but often he preferred to just bask in the glorious light Jack saw him in.
“Oh, most certainly, Bill, you’re smart and witty, and everyone knows you need wit to get around the marketing assistant’s slanderous comments.”
The marketing assistant for Descholtz Manufacturing, and the company had only one, was Dan Chedsky.  He referred to himself as ‘the Hammer,’ but everyone else knew him as ‘the Bastard Hammer,’ not very witty, true, but effective and catchy.  Everyone, both his superiors and his underlings had to catch themselves when they called him over.
“Hey bas- um, Hammer!  Er, could you come here?” was often heard coming from the mouth of many a Descholtz employee followed by long, drawn out conversations regarding bass fishing.  This really confused the Hammer because he had never fished in his life and had no idea why the rest of the world was so fascinated by the activity.  He had often considered going on a fishing expedition himself to find out, but he was a very hard-working man and rarely found time for recreation.  He was very strict with his underlings and he demanded nothing short of the impossible from them.  When he didn’t get what he wanted, or sometimes even when he didn’t get better than what he wanted the Hammer was known for breaking people with his sudden eruptions of fluid insults and name-calling.
“Well, maybe you’re right, Jack,” Bill could just imagine himself sitting behind, well, the same desk, but in a different, larger office.  He stood up and went to the back-left corner of his cubicle above which his neighbour had pinned a poster of blue and white sky.  He tuned his head upwards and searched the clouds.  “It would be pretty sweet, eh?  More money, less work.  Oh ho ho!” He stood up on his toes and swayed back and forth in the sunlight now creeping out from behind a cloud.
“Bill, if you do get he job, do you think, that maybe, possibly, you could hire me as your assistant?” Jack ventured.
“I would be honoured.”  Bill may find Jack slightly annoying, but he was a very hard worker.
“Oh thank you, Bill!” Jack threw his arms around Bill and squeezed him as tight as he could.
“Just don’t leave melted cheese on all of your reports.  I hate it when you do that.”

The Dinner Date
Chapter Three
“Mr. President, you’re on the air.  Say something.”
“Oh, right!  Thank you, Steve.”  The man looked slightly surprised that he was on television, although the look could just as well have been his surprise at how uncomfortable his chair was.  “Good evening, America.  Difficult times lay ahead for us,” his well groomed features and stylish suit spoke otherwise for himself, “and it’s time we become more prudent: prudent with energy, prudent with health, and most of all, prudent in water.”  The producers of the public address had considered having a chipmunk proofread the speech this time, but it would not have been the same for the viewers.  It would have been more intelligible.  “I don’t ask you to do these things forever, but just a little while.  We’ve got to keep up our spirit, America; we must protect the American Dream.  The American Dream does not include living frugally.”  Through his heavy accent the last word came out ‘fr-ugly.’  “I am but man, but you are many.”  The last line, totally lacking sense, would surely have been more inspiring if a chipmunk had written the address.
Bill wasn’t all that fond of this type of prime time programming.  However, he was busy preparing his dinner and his hands were half-way up the ass of a turkey when the address came on and he had been unable to change the channel.  Now he had dried his hands off and grabbed the remote, flicking the channel to thirty-six, where the familiar soothing theme music of The Simpsons was just starting.
Earlier in the evening he had worked up the courage to phone Hillary and ask her over for dinner.  Hillary, who had nearly given up on Bill and considered going out with the local neighbourhood-friendly strip club owner, enthusiastically said, “Yes!”
Bill was nervous trying to get everything ready for a perfect evening.  Bill figured he was already about forty minutes behind schedule and didn’t think it likely he would be able to get the appetizers ready in time, or even the main course.
A knock came at the door.
“Shaz-zoot,” exclaimed the cranberry sauce covered Bill.  He quickly wiped off the excess red sauce, checked to make sure nothing on the stove was in danger of burning, and dashed for the door.
Bill had barely opened the door a centimetre when it was pushed in on him by the visitor outside.  “Open up!  Open up, my brighter Bill, it’s your dear old granddad here for a visit!”  The man walking gaily through the door was not Bill’s grandfather, but rather a burly young gentleman about six feet tall and heavily built.  This stood in striking contrast to the image Bill had of his thin, elderly and short grandfather who had died some years previous.  “I’ve brought you a piece of your grandmother’s pie,” the man said with a chuckle and a crushing slap to Bill’s shoulder.  The object in the man’s hand was, in actuality, a mousetrap with a dead mouse in it.
His voice dropped to a whisper, “I found this in the hall.”  His eyes darted around the apartment, “Some place you’ve got here, Bill, far better than that rat trap you were in last year!”  He paused to stare at Bill, ensuring he was prepared to hear the joke, “at least here they have rat traps!”  He threw his head back, “Hah hah!  Marvellous.”
Ron Sheffield was an old acquaintance of Bill’s from his first year in university.  Bill had never particularly enjoyed Ron’s company and Ron seemed aware of this.  Nevertheless Ron liked to keep in contact, particularly at times when his life was not going as he wished.
Ron collapsed on the couch with a noticeable drop in demeanour.  “Been a rough year, Bill, a damn rough year.”  Bill noticed Ron had forgotten to take of his wet boots.
“Let me get something for you to put your feet on, Ron.”
“No need to worry, Bill,” Ron said as he swung his booted feet onto the coffee table, “this will do fine.”
“Uh, yea…” Ron turned to look at the pots bubbling on the stove.  “Look, if you don’t mind, I need to get back to the stove.”
“O!  I don’t mind at all; I’d love to stay for dinner!”
“Uh, yea…”  Bill went around the corner to the stove, but continued to glance up at Ron through the canteen window.
“Like I was saying, it’s been a rough year, Bill.  Janet’s gone.  She packed up about a month ago, said she,” at this point Ron motioned quotation marks with his fingers, “Can’t stand me anymore.  Whatever, you know?  It’s not like she’s the best I could do.”  Bill begged to differ.  “And frankly, she smelled.  Of cantaloupes,” Ron raised his eyebrows.
“Cantaloupes?” Bill inquired.
“Yea.  Musk melons, you know?  You eat them after dinner,” Ron offered insightfully.
“Yea, I know what a cantaloupe is, I meant –”
“I can’t stand cantaloupes, Bill.  I mean, are you a watermelon or aren’t you?  Decide.”
“I don’t really think –”
“Reeked of them.  Anyway, least of my troubles, frankly.  A blessing, in hindsight.  No, it got much worse after I hooked up with this black chick at a bar.”
Bill was mashing potatoes.  His voice was strained with the effort.  “What happened with that?” He added a quarter litre of milk and a bit more butter.
“Well, she’s got these kids, see.  Tyrone, Hoetrain, and Phyllis.”
“Phyllis?”
“Yea, Phyllis.”
“I see.”
“Well, I hook up with her not knowing this.  She comes back to my apartment, we do the deed, and I think she’s gonna get gone, but instead she tells me her kids are out in the car.”
“She drove there on her own?”
“No, no, no.  I’m a gentleman, Bryan.”
“It’s Bi–”
“We came on the bus.  I even paid part of her fare,” Ron’s eyes widened, seeking approval for his public transport generosity from Bill.  “No, the kids drove there.”
“How old are they?”
“Hell if I know.  I think the oldest is thirteen.  So she asks if they can come up.  I’m a little taken back.  I mean, kids?  You know me and kids.”
“I don’t, actually.”  Bill had moved on to the turkey that was now basting nicely in the oven.  He chopped another carrot and added it to the roast.
“Well, I hate them,” Ron said shaking his head, “Leeches.  These ones particularly.  So they come up and start eating my cereal.”
“They started eating your cereal?”
“Well, after they were there a couple days they were getting hungry, I guess.”
“Why were they there a couple days?”
“Apparently the one had a bit of a rep for killing the neighbours’ pets.  Little ones, mostly: rabbits, hamsters.  He even roasted a budgee.  But I guess the last straw was when he bit the super’s cat.”
“A cat?  That was stepping it up a little, eh?”
“Well the cat was fine.  Except for the bite mark on its back.  I think the kid came out worse for the wear.  The swelling from the scratches is so bad he can’t see or hear.  The other kids feed him cereal through a straw.”
“Through a straw?”
“Let it soak up the milk for a day and it’s just mush anyway.”
“I see.”  Bill found himself stopping and staring at Ron as he talked.  The man’s matter-of-fact style was… captivating.  Bill nearly let the vegetable casserole burn.
“So the super kicked them out.  I would have kicked them out too but the sex was so good.”
“With the…”
“The black chick, yea.  Well, I figured I’d give it a few days anyway; the girl seemed down on her luck and the way she gyrated–”
“Yea, thanks for the imagery Ron.”
“–I couldn’t last more than a few minutes before–”
“Yea, yea, okay.”
“But a few days was enough for her to come up with a positive on a pregnancy test.”
“O boy…”
“So she wants to stay, but I had noticed Hoetrain eyeing my black lab, I was nearly out of Shreddies, and they were all so filthy.”
“Were they not bathing?”
“I just had that washroom re-done!  As if I was going to let some mud-pawed brats in there to play with the new taps.”
“Yuh huh.”
“I let her in there to clean my gunk out of her–”
“Yea, okay.  Go on, please.”  Time was flying, dinner was almost ready, and Hillary was due to arrive soon.  He needed Ron to wrap up his story so he could give him a drumstick and send him on his way.
“Well I tell her that they all need to leave and that she’d need to prove it was my baby before I was going to do anything about it.”
“Noble.”
“So they go outside and set up camp on the lawn.  They found an old tarp in a nearby garbage dumpster and grabbed a tree branch or something so they could make a tent.”  Ron rolled his eyes.  “The neighbours,” he paused to ensure Bill was paying attention.  “The neighbours, Bill, with whom I’ve never had very good relations, think a protest against my behaviour has been set up, so they all start picketing outside my door!”
“What behaviour?” I asked, pulling the turkey from the oven.
“O, this smartass Joe Whimsby decided to stuff some pamphlets for his new evangelical church in my screen door one day.  I decided to stuff a live badger into his the next.  Word got around, the police were involved but couldn’t prove anything, but then everybody started treating me like some sort of deviant.”
“You’re not?”
“So I like to give them a piece of my mind once in a while – it’s a free country!”  Ron threw his arms wide to denote the vastness of his free country.  “Dinner smells good; what is it?”
“Roast turkey.”
“O man, I lucked out, eh?!”
“Yea, about that–”  Bill was interrupted by the ringing telephone.  “Pardon me a moment.”  He moved to the wall mount and picked up the receiver.  “Ahoy-hoy?”
“Hi, Bill, it’s Hillary.”  The sweet voice on the other end of the line sent Bill swooning into the flood of memories filling his mind.  It took him a second to gather his senses and wipe his mouth of the imaginary snogging taking place on its lips.
“Hillary!  So wonderful to hear from you.  All ready for tonight?”
“Yea, about that: I can’t come.  I’m sorry.”
“O, well, that’s…” Bill’s heart plummeted down into his stomach, “I mean, if you’re not sure you want to, I promise I’ll be a gentleman.”  The promise was really more of a semi-promise, but at this point it didn’t matter.
“It’s not that Bill; something’s come up.  I’m sorry.  I hope you didn’t go to much trouble.  Take care.”  She said it all so quickly that when he went to respond she had already hung up.
“Who was that?” Ron asked.
“My date.  She cancelled.”  Bill rested his hands on the counter and leaned forward, looking down.
“Just you and me tonight, then?”
“I guess.”
“Excellent!” Ron got up, walked over to the table and sat down.  “Well, you mustn’t have thought it was going to work out anyway, you’ve only set two spots!  Bill, Bill, I don’t know how you get yourself into this sort of thing.”
“Uh, yea…”
“So, anyway, the black chic befriends all of my neighbours and they get Hoetrain to climb up the hydro poll and cut off my electricity.  Then Tyrone and Phyllis dig this big hole in my front yard down to my pipes, and they somehow turn them off too.  And don’t get me started about the utility companies!  A bunch of inbreds, they are; haven’t liked me since this incident with Harry Tate’s peacock…”
Bill turned his back on Ron as he continued on.  Looking out the window, he couldn’t understand what could have gone wrong with tonight’s dinner.  Hillary had seemed so excited earlier.